#BlackLivesMatter details

Every tweet that includes #blacklivesmatter, as well as many of its derivatives (i.e., #allLivesMatter, #policeLivesMatter, #lbgtLivesMatter, etc.) is displayed as a small circle (black fill with white stroke).

The user that posted the tweet is displayed as an orange circle.

The user’s screen name (“@screenname”) and the tweet’s text are displayed on the lower left of the screen.

Any and all other hashtags in the tweet are linked (with thin lines) to the tweet as gray-filled circles with white stroke with a text label (i.e., “trayvonmartin”). The “blacklivesmatter” hashtag which is red.

The size of each circle corresponds to the number of times the tweet was retweeted, or the number of times a hashtag has been mentioned since the server began running. Popularity = size

Any photos are displayed as thumbnails in the graph, and then shown larger on the right for about 10 seconds.

Tweets, hashtags and photos “age” and will “die” after about minute (or sooner if there lots of activity and the graph would be overwhelmed). They disappear when dead. If a tweet/hashtag/photo is seen again before they die, then their lifespan is increased by a small percentage.

Hovering the cursor over a node (i.e., a tweet circle, a user circle, a photo thumbnail) will display a pop-up with info about the node (i.e., number on mentions, number of 'favorites', tweet text).

Clicking on a tweet or hashtag will open the url (link) to the original tweet or a twitter realtime search of the hashtag

Clicking on a thumbnail will display the photo larger on the right. Clicking on the large photo on the left will open the url of the original tweet that posted the photo.

Depending upon your browser, tweets can be read aloud using text-to-speech. Audio is off by default. You can turn it on/off with the button at the top center of the display. Currently, the Firefox browser doesn’t support text-to-speech, and some earlier versions of other browsers do not support text-to-speech, either.